


and the sea keeps its secrets

by ncfan



Series: Legendarium Ladies April [22]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Anthropomorphization of the Sea, Beleriand, First Age, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Loss, Nevrast, Ocean, POV Female Character, The Sea is not nice, This is one Elf who isn't getting sea-longing, Tumblr: legendariumladiesapril, legendarium ladies april, the sea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-26
Updated: 2018-04-26
Packaged: 2019-04-28 09:41:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14446527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Itarillë was not fond of the Sea.





	and the sea keeps its secrets

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the April 21st [poetry prompt](http://legendariumladiesapril.tumblr.com/post/173157348542/legendarium-ladies-april-prompts-for-april-21), ‘upon realizing there are ghosts in the water.’ The full text of the poem is in the endnote.

Itarillë was not fond of the Sea. You might have a hard time grasping that, for any length of time she had to herself that was longer than an hour or so saw her visiting the shore of Nevrast, her silver-scarred feet leaving only the faintest of indentations in the fine-grained white sand. It was not that she longed for solitude—she didn’t, not the way her aunt seemed to at times. There was some irritation regarding the matter of names—being called ‘Idril’ not only by the Sindar, but now by some of the Ñoldor as well, only made her cling more fiercely to ‘Itarillë’—but it wasn’t anything she couldn't bear. She had borne far worse in her time than being called by the wrong name.

Itarillë was not fond of the Sea, and yet every clear day she had a few hours to herself found her there, pacing the shore like a caged beast. Of those few who were down on the beach with her, no one ever asked her what her purpose was for coming. Some were over-awed by her status as a princess of the Calaquendi, and did not dare approach. Others moved closer towards her—until the wind snapped her hair back from her face, at which point they took one look at her face and promptly thought better of saying anything to her.

Was she really so terrifying when she went to confront the Sea? Itarillë could not say for certain that they had not seen something that wasn’t really there. It was not her _intent_ to frighten any Quendë who crossed her path here. Whatever she felt, it was not or them.

It was for the Sea, alone.

Her father was supposed to be beloved of Ulmo. In the beginning, Itarillë had thought that that love might extend to her, if only in pieces. Enough that she would be given answers for her questions. She was owed that much, was she not? She had so many questions, and was owed answers.

(She had begged for answers when it was Ice under her feet and not sand. She had begged for answers and expected to receive them because under endless darkness, she had yet to grasp that the Doomsman had damned the innocent alongside the guilty, and turned his back on both. Then, she had expected answers because she still believed in the unflinching goodness of the Valar, enough to believe she could ask a question and expect to have it answered without invoking any special bond of love. She knew better now.)

 _Not well enough, though_ , she thought to herself, every time she asked her questions, and no answer was forthcoming from the Sea’s shifting, shimmering lips.

That was the same story, every time. She carried her questions down to the Sea, and the indifferent water and the indifferent Ainur who lived in its depths did not deign to answer.

A pearl-gleam of memory shone in her mind: being very small and giggling as the waves lapped at her feet. Elenwë wouldn’t let her wander more than a few feet from her side—the starlit shores of Alqualondë were too shadowy and too far from “true” civilization for a Minya’s tastes. Elenwë’s love was for the wind and the high places of Valinor, not for the Sea, lovely as the shore might have been.

Itarillë had hunted down watery gleams of gems lying half-buried in sand and washed them clean in the shallows. Her mother laughed, but something unhappy enfeebled her voice. Fear of her child shading the greed that marked many of the Ñoldor in the Minyar’s mind, Itarillë guessed—Elenwë had made Itarillë put each of the gems back where she found them, to be crusted with sand again, and they had left the shore behind them.

Then, Itarillë had not loved the Sea, not exactly. Her mother’s disquiet had cast something of a pall over her enjoyment, and had effectively kept love from sprouting in Itarillë’s heart. (There had always been a pall over everything. The Sea was tainted with Elenwë’s unease and its own hungry voice. The wind in the high places was sour with fear. The earth seemed to actively resist farmers’ attempts to till it, and when Itarillë was given copper to fashion, she inhaled its copper scent and all she smelled was blood. She had loved none of it. She still couldn’t.) It wasn’t love she felt—love was difficult to come by in those fraught years before the Darkening, when the peace of Valinor had turned rancid.

It was impossible to deny that there had been a certain affection in Itarillë’s heart, though. To the eyes of the child she had been, the Sea had been utterly without end. She knew _of_ Endóre, of course—everyone did—but it was easy to imagine that the water just went on forever. That the Sea filled the whole plane of the universe, and Aman and Endóre were tiny islands in a trackless blue Sea. That you could have the gills of a fish and no worry about the weight of the water, and swim down further and further for all eternity, and never reach the bottom. That anything could be in there, just waiting for discovery.

As a child, the idea of it had filled Itarillë’s heart with a fierce affection. As an adult, she still felt and believed the things she had felt and believed as a child. They were terrible things to think, now.

Anything could be out there. Everything was _in_ there. And the Sea, no matter how you begged, would never give any of it back.

She had paced the shores of Nevrast what felt like thousands of times. The waters were closed to her. Itarillë had never bene a strong swimmer, even in the most placid pool, and the waves grew instantly rougher when a Ñoldo waded out into the ocean—an echo of Ossë’s fury. The hearts of the Ainur who ruled the Sea was closed to her. Itarillë had thought their abandonment would foment anger, but all she felt was an ache like a blackened bruise where the certainty of their love should have been.

The Sea had swallowed many Ñoldor, and one Minya. It had never spat any of them back up. It took so little for Itarillë to be transported back to the Helcaraxë. How eagerly had the Sea rushed up to trap her in its jaws, how cruelly had it worried at her flesh with its teeth, slathering at the chance to batter her body until it broke. She was one of the innocent-who-were-damned, so the Sea was encouraged to prolong her suffering as long as possible. (When her father had wrested her from its jaws, its scream of fury at being denied her reverberated in Itarillë’s bones. That scream echoed across time to her, usually on dark nights when Rána’s light was gone and Itarillë, in the first fuzzy moment after waking, could forget where she was.)

Perhaps they had been eaten—Itarillë had heard from the Falmari and the Falathrim alike that there were man monsters in the Sea, misshapen things that defied name and description alike. Perhaps the Sea toyed with them still, battering green, bloated corpses until they finally burst and befouled the water with the corruption of their putrid decay. Perhaps the Ainur had dragged their bodies down to the depths and by their great power chained the dead’s spirits to their rotting corpses. It was not an unreasonable fear, Itarillë thought, though she shuddered to imagine it befalling her mother. Innocent and guilty alike, the Exiles were damned, so utterly damned that even the unborn carried the terrible burden of the Doomsman’s curse. Who was to say that the spirits of the damned would not be denied respite in Mandos?

The Sea gave her no answers, but was happy to taunt her with its silence, with its power to deny her any kind of answer. It nipped at her heels, its teeth grazing against the flesh it had been denied years and decades ago, as if to remind her that it could drag her back under at any time, if it so desired. The more she asked it her questions, the more it slipped away from her, chortling. When she finally succumbed to frustration and ran out into the surf, the waves shoved her roughly back in rejection—they would have the unwilling in a heartbeat, but never one in whom it could be said even the slightest trace of willingness existed.

Itarillë was not fond of the Sea. There were many who said that monsters lived in the Sea, and perhaps that was true. But those who heeded the wisdom of Idril Celebrindal knew that the Sea bread no greater monster than it already was itself.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Calaquendi** —“Elves of the Light”; the Elves who came to Aman from Cuiviénen, or were born there, especially those born during the Years of the Trees and had born witness to their light; the Vanyar, the Ñoldor, and the Falmari (singular: Calaquendë) (Quenya)  
>  **Endóre** —Middle-Earth (Quenya)  
>  **Falathrim** —‘People of the foaming shore’ (Sindarin) or ‘Coast people’ (Sindarin); the Sindar of the Havens of the Falas in Beleriand; Círdan’s people.  
>  **Falmari** —those among the Teleri who completed the journey to Aman; the name is derived from the Quenya falma, '[crested] wave.'  
>  **Helcaraxë** —the Grinding Ice (Quenya); the bridge of ice between Araman and Middle-Earth in the far north of the world. Morgoth and Ungoliant escaped to Middle-Earth by this road after destroying the Two Trees. Later, after the burning of the ships at Losgar, the Ñoldorin exiles abandoned on the other side of the sea traveled to Middle-Earth by this road at great risk to themselves.  
>  **Minyar** —‘Firsts’, the first clan of the Elves of Cuiviénen, who were named for Imin and Iminyë, the former of whom was the first Elf to awaken. The Ñoldor called them ‘Vanyar’, ‘Fair ones’ (rendered in Primitive Quendian as ‘wanjā’, and rendered in Telerin as ‘Vaniai’), due to the nearly-universal trait of fair hair among the clan, but even in Aman, they still often referred to themselves as ‘Minyar.’ (Singular: Minya) (Adjectival form: Minyarin)  
>  **Quendë** —literally ‘Speaker’; an Elf (plural: Quendi) (Quenya)  
>  **Rána** —a name given to the Moon by the Ñoldorin Exiles, signifying ‘The Wanderer’ (Exilic Quenya); of the Sun and the Moon, it is the elder of the two vessels, lit by Telperion’s last flower; in an early version of ‘Of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor’ was said to be “the giver of visions” ( _The Lost Road_ 264).
> 
>  _upon realizing there are ghosts in the water_ by Leila Chatti
> 
> — _in memory of the refugees drowned crossing the Mediterranean Sea_
> 
> I should have known but the water  
> never told me. It sealed its blue lips  
> after swallowing you, it licked my ankles  
> like a dog. I won’t lie  
> and say the ocean begged for forgiveness;  
> it gleams unchanged in the sun.  
> Some things are so big they take and take  
> and remain exactly the same size.  
> Darkness is like this; grief too. I cry  
> and the ocean slips from me—all along  
> a little sea roiling inside with its own  
> sad phantoms. For a summer I soaked in  
> its green warmth, wore its salt like gemstones.  
> Now the heavy shame: how I waded in  
> to your grave as if trying it on,  
> how, when the waves came,  
> they gave me back.


End file.
